Introduction

In 2009, the British Library launched a successful public appeal for donations to enable it to purchase a manuscript volume written by Captain John Narbrough. ¹ A note on the first page of the manuscript indicates that he acquired the blank volume on 7 April 1666, and states it is ‘his Booke’. It contains the logs of his naval service in the Caribbean 1666–8 and his voyage through the Strait of Magellan to Chile, which was carried out as a result of a proposal made by one Don Carlos Enriques to the King, as well as copies of his commissions, instructions and correspondence relating to them, together with his instructions to the commander appointed to accompany him on his 1669 voyage. ² His record of his 1669–71 voyage, here transcribed and made available in print for the first time, records Narbrough’s careful survey and delineation of part of the coast of Patagonia and the Strait of Magellan, and of his voyage along the Chilean coast as far north as Valdivia, accompanied by three manuscript charts and one printed chart. Printed with it here are the full transcript of a previous partially published fair copy of a portion of the journal running from 13 October 1669 to 9 January 1671, ³ and three journals of men who served in the expedition. Also included are Portuguese and Spanish State Papers and Colonial Office documents recently discovered in The National Archive, Kew which clarify when and how Don Carlos Enriquez arrived at the court of Charles II and provide the sequence of proposals which he made to the King and his ministers. ⁴ Entries in the journal of Edward Montague, 1st Earl of Sandwich cast further light on these interchanges. ⁵ Spanish State Papers held by the British Library reveal that a copy of Don Carlos’s testimony to authorities in Chile in January 1671 was subsequently forwarded to James Duke of York by an informant in Spain. ⁶ All of these accounts, together with the images of Narbrough’s manuscript charts and those subsequently published from them, and with the information from the journal and Sailing Directions of John Wood which were subsequently partially published, ⁷ and which are referred to, constitute the fullest known account, written and cartographical, of the venture and allow for a clearer appreciation of Narbrough’s abilities as a commander, navigator and hydrographic surveyor. Previously characterized by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars as ‘weak’ 2and ‘inexperienced’ ¹ and his voyage as ‘discreditable’ ² and having ‘failed miserably’, ³ the fuller record here provided shows him to have been an efficient and distinguished officer, charged with an ambiguous and difficult mission, overtly directed to explore the Patagonian coastline and ascertain the practicalities of peaceful trade with the natives, but undoubtedly also expected to ascertain the Spanish strength in the area and the potential for the incursion of the English into the Spanish gold trade in the southern limits of the viceroyalty of Peru. Given these objectives he carried out his instructions to the letter and provided a written and cartographic record of where he sailed, what he saw and those he encountered. Those who were subsequently to rely on it for passage through the same difficult waters found that record to be ‘so just and exact, that we think it impossible for any living to mend his Works’ ⁴ and that ‘His voyage, more than any other, may be regarded as a directory for the navigation to the coast of Patagonia and the Strait of Magalhanes’. ⁵